On the Downplay: A Leadership Shift

“Who wants to be celebrated for doing a bigger lift this week?”

That question came from the instructor in a weight training class I’m taking this summer. She also happens to be a first-grade teacher. I couldn’t help but think she asks something similar of her six-year-old students.

In contrast to her upbeat energy, I felt a twinge of awkwardness, unsure if I wanted to speak up. In fact, I had done a bigger lift. But like many people, I’ve internalized workplace norms that tell me to calibrate how I share my success.

The instructor’s question is rarely asked in professional life—a direct invitation to call out incremental progress during the week-in, week-out reality of pursuing long-term goals.

Instead, we tend to wait for quarterly reports or annual reviews to present our achievements.

Or we resort to humblebragging, which research shows is likely to backfire by diminishing both credibility and likability.

Research also demonstrates a persistent self-promotion gap by gender. While men who highlight their accomplishments tend to be viewed as competent and confident leaders, women who do the same thing often encounter social and professional backlash.

But perception shifts dramatically when a person is invited to share.

Responding to an invitation largely neutralizes the social tax of sharing achievements. You’re no longer self-promoting—you’re simply answering a question.

For leaders, this means regularly asking your team to speak about their wins isn’t just an exercise in morale. It’s a practice that builds inclusion and fosters psychological safety, while gathering valuable business intelligence and keeping performance outcomes in focus.

When was the last time someone invited you to share your success?

Maybe not in a while.

So, let me extend the invitation:
Who wants to be celebrated for a win you achieved this week?

Drop your answer in the comments below—I’d love to celebrate it with you.

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Worth Considering

Self-Promotion & Gender Dynamics

• Savvy Self-Promotion (Lesley K. John, Harvard Business Review)

• Yet Another Annoying Study About Double Standards at Work Shows Social Climbing Works for Men but Backfires Spectacularly for Women (Jessica Stillman, Inc. Magazine)

Sloptimized AI Search

• Your Search Results Are Getting Sloptimized (Will Oremus, The Atlantic)
  “Sloptimization is a symptom of an internet that was built to connect humans but now more often connects machines. Much of the text online is already AI-written, and now people are generating content that is primarily created for bots to read.”

Church, State, and Marketplace

• How Did American Christianity End Up Like This? (Michael Lou, The New Yorker)
  “The great deregulation of religion led to a thriving marketplace, forcing churches to innovate and to compete for customers. The question, then as now, was how the winners would seek to imprint their values and beliefs on the nation.”

• The Commodification of Christianity (Freya India, GIRLS on Substack)
  ”I think if Christians want to reach my generation, really reach us, they have to promise something totally separate from that, something otherworldly, something that doesn’t abide by market logic, something different, divine. Something, for once, that isn’t cheapened or commodified.”

Curiosity as a Work Survival Mindset

• Having Many Careers Will Be the Norm, Experts Say (Douglas Bloom, World Economic Forum)
  The average American will hold 12 jobs during their working lifetime. And, for half of today’s workers, some of the job skills learned in the last few years are already nearing or beyond their best-by date. No wonder ‘Curiosity and lifelong learning’ is the top-ranked attitude for surviving the constant state of change.

As you read, I’d love to know what reflects your own leadership practice right now. What patterns or questions are you observing in your internal or organizational landscape?

If you’re reading in the Substack app, you can respond by tapping the speech bubble below. If you’re reading this in your inbox, click the comment icon at the top or bottom of the email to add your perspective.

On Fractional Leadership and Organizational Mission

I recently concluded a fractional leadership role—a step of agency to balance two things: the stewardship of my best work and a new season in the organizational mission. This transition got me thinking about how organizations use temporary executive capacity.

5 Questions Leaders Should Ask Before Turning to Fractional Work (Joy Batra and Dorie Clark, Harvard Business Review)

This piece offers excellent individual guidance on finances and skills. I’d add some important organizational questions:

• When an organization brings in fractional executive talent, are they solving a clear strategic capacity issue?

• When might there be a risk of relying on temporary expertise and avoiding the structural work required for sustainability?

• What length of engagement is needed? And what does a good and necessary ending look like?

The Crisis of Agency and the Return-to-Office Illusion

Leaders Feel Their Agency Eroding—and They’re Starting to Withdraw (Merete Wedell-Wedellsborg, Harvard Business Review)

Amid rising volatility and uncertainty, leaders are increasingly withdrawing, or fighting an urge to withdraw, from decision-making and the emotional labor of leadership—or even from the belief that their effort still matters.

The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office (Adam Grant, Marissa Shandell, and Courtney Elliot, New York Times)

New research reveals that the objection to any work from home isn’t about collaboration, creativity, or culture. It’s about ego—a power move by leaders who exhibit narcissistic qualities.

Restorative Antidotes: Valuing Invisible Work and Doing Nothing Together

The Invisible Work That Holds Teams Together and 3 Practices for Capacity-Aware Leadership (Leadership Field Notes)

I sat down recently to record a podcast episode with The Mode/Switch team about learning to see and value invisible work—the labor that fills systemic gaps with goodwill and makeshift solutions. Too often, this work leaves leaders and teams vulnerable to overextension and burnout.

I’ll share the podcast when it drops. Meanwhile, you can catch up on the related articles.

Fold Laundry With Me (Julie Beck, The Atlantic)

When people are stressed, a common reaction is to cancel social plans. But trading social time for me time sacrifices what research has found is the No. 1 predictor of a happy life: relationships. A reframed perspective on connection lowers the stakes and makes room for the beauty of doing nothing together.

A Reflection on Aliveness

Vibrant Matter (Barbara Brown Taylor, Substack)

Tuning in to our physical world is an important act of stewardship. Barbara’s writing is a luminous reminder to behold both the vastness and closeness of what makes us fully alive.

Join the Conversation

If a particular pattern or question from these pieces resonated with your week, I’d love to hear from you in the comments. And if you know another growth-minded leader who would appreciate these notes, please feel free to share.

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The first responsibility of a leader
is to define reality.
—Max De Pree

Gaps and patterns tell the story of invisible work and the risk it carries for individuals and organizations. If we don’t discern it, we won’t have an accurate definition of reality.

But seeing creates a new, sharper tension: recognition alone doesn’t change the way the work actually gets done. The nagging question for founders and leaders in scaling organizations is no longer if stability is being borrowed for too long, but how to stop the dependency before the cost becomes a crisis.

This article is where we translate diagnosis into design. The work of capacity-aware leadership requires treating the limits of our team as essential facts to work with, so we can identify sustainable solutions.

From there, leadership is a series of behavioral choices that, one by one, build our organizational architecture. When we set goals, we are designing the space where people prioritize their time and respond to demands. And when we ignore the reality of capacity, we aren’t just pushing for results—we are building a system that requires exhaustion to function.

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Leading well means making invisible limits visible so they can be addressed with intention rather than heroics. It also means checking ourselves in the mirror.

This article offers three repeatable practices to help leaders move from awareness to action: asking for context before commitment, reframing progress without creating hidden pressure, and treating limits as data rather than resistance.

Practice 1: Asking for Context Before Commitment

The first move in capacity-aware leadership is how we ask for commitment. In growth environments, it’s hard for us to see exactly how much weight a new project adds to the people on the ground—the hidden coordination, the context switching, and the relational labor required to “make it work.” By asking good questions and making it safe to answer honestly, leaders surface information that enables more effective decisions.

Start With the Collective

The overlap between capacity planning (having the right resources) and strategic alignment (working on the right goals) is where most operational confusion occurs.

When planning, a structural question becomes a feasibility stress-test: “Our strategy is to take on X. What needs to be true for X to succeed without destabilizing our existing commitments?”

This question shifts the conversation from personal willingness to systemic requirements and, if necessary, the priority ranking of new and existing commitments. It allows the team to discuss dependencies and timing as strategic variables rather than signs of weakness. (More on this in Practice 3.)

Extend the Practice Relationally

If the strategic review is your wide-angle lens, the 1:1 with direct reports is your high-fidelity sensor. These conversations can easily be filled with status updates and problem-solving. But making time for deeper questions can reveal capacity signals that might otherwise be missed in output metrics, especially for player-coaches who have to monitor both the output and the person producing it.

Seven Questions for Capacity-Aware 1:1s

Use these questions—either as a rotation or a targeted deep-dive—to shift the focus from the “what” of the work to the “how” of system health:

1. What’s taking more energy than you expected right now? — Identifies hidden friction points in the workflow

2. Where are you being pulled into decisions that slow the work without adding clear value? — Surfaces the “coordination tax” of the current structure

3. Which work-related concerns are the hardest to turn off at the end of the day? — Highlights high-risk cognitive load and “mental carryover”

4. Where is delegation working—and where is it starting to feel like a bottleneck? — Pinpoints specific gaps in trust, skill, or process

5. Who is quietly compensating for gaps in the system right now? — Names the “glue” players at risk of absorbing a systemic burden

6. If one variable doesn’t change, what makes the next quarter feel unsustainable? — Anticipates the breaking point before it becomes a crisis

7. What do I need to understand about the weight of what I’m asking of you? — Acknowledges the power dynamic and fosters psychological safety

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When these questions are asked thoughtfully, leaders gain a clearer picture. We see where capacity is stretched, where hidden work is accumulating, and what decisions require immediate attention. This kind of clarity helps you see if a new process will actually help, or if we’re just giving an exhausted team one more thing to manage.

The practice of asking for context reduces the pressure on people to push through and increases the organization’s ability to learn and adapt before strain becomes burnout.

Practice 2: Framing Progress as Human, Not Heroic

Most leaders I know are committed to progress. That’s why phrases like “we’ll find a way” become so familiar. The problem arises when that phrase becomes shorthand for a shortcut—a way to bypass the harder leadership work of structural alignment.

When we rely on grit to stand in for an appropriately supported plan, we risk sliding into what author and therapist Chuck DeGroat calls autonomic bullying. It’s a startling term. But it seems more useful than “burnout,” a word we’ve heard so often we’ve become numb to its weight—treating it as little more than a synonym for being tired.

Workplace research increasingly finds that we have moved past the era where burnout is an occasional byproduct of a “crunch” period. Today’s sustained levels of fatigue signal a fundamental mismatch between our current operating models and the capacity of our teams.

Autonomic bullying is a term harder to ignore because it suggests an active disregard for human design. DeGroat defines it as “presuming authority over another person’s internal state and insisting they override their embodied reality to meet our expectations.” Notice if there’s tension in your own body as you read that definition. You may recognize the moment you last felt that presumption—or the moment you were forced to pass it on to your team.

In the workplace, this behavior isn't necessarily overt. It’s easy to miss because it seems practical: “I know you’re at capacity, but you’re the only one who can get this across the finish line.” It is the act of requiring a person’s availability and effort without regard for what their nervous system can actually sustain. It happens when our buoyant “find a way” language signals “endure first and figure it out later.”

Capacity-aware leadership moves us away from this reliance on heroic endurance—where we implicitly treat exhaustion as a proxy for commitment—and toward thoughtful stewardship.

Then we can frame commitment with a few specific questions:

• If we are “finding a way,” what exactly is changing? Is it the scope, the sequencing, the decision rights, or the resourcing?

• What support will be required that isn’t currently named?

• What trade-offs are we willing to make so this doesn’t rely on over-extension?

Human-sized framing values ambition without asking people to absorb systemic gaps or uncertainty. In this light, progress isn’t about how much resolve you can summon; it’s about how well you can design the path forward.

Practice 3: Treat Limits as Facts, Not Resistance

Senior leaders often find themselves in a squeeze spot: the numbers we’re chasing don’t care if the team is tired. But we know that the work only lasts if it respects the people doing it. Therefore, limits matter to success.

Capacity-aware leadership treats a team’s limits with the same respect as their strengths. Both are essential facts for designing systems, setting priorities, and managing risk. Importantly, limits show where the organization may have created a dependency on invisible work or borrowed stability, where processes are incomplete, or where roles are underdefined.

Naming these limits isn't a challenge to authority—it’s providing the data needed for discernment. Leaders often need a protected space to interpret that data, especially when the solution isn’t just “more support,” but a clearer understanding of what the system is actually asking for.

This perspective also creates space for saying “no”—because without trade-offs, you don’t have a strategy, you have a list that’s too long to be realistic. If we don’t say ‘no’ to overextending our people, we are implicitly saying ‘no’ to the long-term integrity of our mission. When we treat limits as data, we protect the organization’s ability to actually deliver what it promises.

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Active listening is essential here. The questions leaders ask in 1:1s or executive forums are more valuable if we track patterns across the system, accounting for various individual responses. When multiple leaders, teams, or departments report friction around the same constraint, it becomes a signal about structural or resource gaps rather than an isolated instance. Patterns guide decisions about trade-offs, delegation, and support.

Approaching limits this way yields three concrete benefits:

1. Clear priorities: Understanding where capacity is constrained allows leaders to choose what matters now and what can wait.

2. Creative problem-solving: Constraints spark innovation, so when leaders acknowledge limits, teams are encouraged to design smarter processes, roles, or resource allocations rather than simply working harder.

3. Cultural trust: When limits are treated as data, people feel safe to surface capacity issues without fear of judgment, creating a more reliable system for decision-making and execution.

In short, treating limits as data doesn’t reduce ambition but instead anchors it in a clear definition of reality—the leader’s first responsibility. This clarity strengthens decision-making and stewards the human energy required for sustained impact.

Closing Note: The Leader’s Own Capacity

Moving from recognizing a pattern to practicing a new way of leading is a significant shift. The journey begins with noticing invisible work, recognizing how it creates a dependency risk, and identifying the structural gaps that create borrowed stability.

But as you apply these practices, there is a first reality to define: yours.

We often act as human buffers—attempting to build a capacity-aware environment for our teams while navigating a high-growth culture that still demands the impossible from us.

When we treat our own limits as facts, we can see where we may have absorbed and prolonged stabilizing behaviors. Our nervous systems may already be signaling structural fatigue—the early warning signs of a collapse we haven’t yet recognized. The goal of naming these patterns isn’t to create guilt, but to awaken agency.

Advocating for your team’s humanity must start with acknowledging your own.

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Context Session

The work of defining reality is often easier with an outside perspective. If you’re navigating a “squeeze spot” and need a protected space to interpret the data of your team’s capacity, you can book a brief, no-charge Context Session. This conversation provides a structured way to gain perspective and guide your decision-making.

Explore the 4-part series on Borrowed Stability: Invisible Work → The Reliability Risk → Leadership Jenga → Capacity-Aware Practices

In some organizations, gaps are quietly filled by unofficial “blocks” added to the tower—behaviors by key individuals who lend stability when and where it’s needed.

Common Stabilizing Behaviors

You might recognize common stabilizing behaviors, none of which are inherently problematic. Most of them look like leadership:

• Maintaining a positive outlook and not complaining when workarounds require extra time

• Rallying to meet a deadline when your team is short-staffed or overwhelmed

• Encouraging an introverted team member to share their ideas—and affirming credit to them when they do

• Volunteering for a task force outside your department to solve a company-wide problem

• Managing up during a season of growth that requires shifts in decision-making and delegation

• Championing the organization’s mission and values outside of work hours

We can admire the good intentions here and still be concerned when the same people consistently contribute in these ways. Over time, it becomes easy to assume the system itself is stable—when in fact, stability is being supplied by individuals filling in what the structure does not yet hold.

Most leaders don’t intend to create dependency on borrowed stability. It usually happens one reasonable decision at a time, in response to real needs. Those reasonable decisions may include interventions applied before the system itself is fully understood, adding motion without increasing clarity.

Borrowed stability may reveal itself through hesitation long before the risk of failure. Progress slows because a familiar voice isn’t available. Decisions wait for one person’s reassurance. Momentum depends less on how the work is designed and more on who happens to be present.

For the people providing that extra stability, the strain is rarely obvious at first. It shows up as fatigue that’s hard to name or a concern that stepping back would let others down. What looks like commitment from the outside can feel like pressure from the inside.

Although the tower still stands, the missing blocks are evident at eye level. Seeing the gaps is where leadership discernment begins. Before adding support, process, or structure, leaders often need a clearer picture of whether the issue is capacity, coordination, or something more foundational in how the system is designed.

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Context Session

If you’d like to explore patterns, constraints, or options in your leadership context, I offer a brief, no-charge Context Session. This conversation provides a structured way to gain perspective and guide your decision-making.

Previously in the Borrowed Stability series

For emotionally intelligent leaders who serve as stabilizers, this work can run like an app in the background. It’s intuitive and easily taken for granted. When it works, people may not notice. But when it stops, the impact is immediate.

These stabilizers are often relational leaders who anticipate needs and fill gaps in processes. In both nonprofit and business contexts, they are adept at integrating formal systems and makeshift solutions—doing what it takes to keep teams and projects moving forward. Sometimes they solve the same problem multiple ways before finding the most acceptable fit for an evolving organizational system or fundraising strategy.

So what’s the risk?

The very skills that make stabilizers effective also make their contributions easy to overlook. Reliability and responsiveness are visible traits, but the effort behind them may go unrecognized. Stabilizers are left vulnerable to overextension and burnout as the organization remains unaware of systemic gaps these leaders are bridging.

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Researchers have a name for this: organizational citizenship behavior. It’s engagement that isn’t formally required or recognized, yet enables the organization to function efficiently. When this work becomes the norm, borrowed stability can set in.

A side note here: I’m borrowing (yes) this term from finance, referring to how high levels of debt can create the appearance of stability while masking an underlying business risk—like a household living day to day on maxed-out credit cards.

Leadership provides stability in important ways. The concern arises when the system asks too much for too long. We can take a few practical steps to account for stabilizing work so that it doesn’t become unsustainable:

1. Observe patterns, not just outputs.

Look beyond deliverables. Notice who coordinates across teams, fills knowledge gaps, or prevents small issues from escalating. If you can’t see it, ask around. Which work keeps the system running but isn’t in a formal role—and who contributes to it?

2. Make the work visible.

Recognition doesn’t mean spotlighting or micromanaging. It means acknowledging contributions and exploring how systems can sustainably support stabilizers. Sense-making, creation, and execution each play different roles, and trouble starts when systems reward only what’s easiest to see.

3. Balance the load.

Encourage shared ownership by clarifying decision-making and developing processes that reduce dependence on any single person—while still honoring the judgment and relational intelligence stabilizers bring.

Borrowed stability is a reality of complex work. The key is seeing it clearly, naming it, and making thoughtful choices about how to steward both people and systems. When we do this well, we give people room to keep bringing their best—and we give our work a better chance of holding over time.

One question worth sitting with: when stability depends on invisible effort, what are we actually asking of our people—and for how long?

Source: Sarah Stepanek, MA, and Megan Paul, PhD, “Umbrella summary: Organizational citizenship behavior,” Quality Improvement Center for Workforce Development, November 2, 2022.

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Context Session

If you’d like to explore patterns, constraints, or options in your leadership context, I offer a brief, no-charge Context Session. This conversation provides a structured way to gain perspective and guide your decision-making.

Next in the Borrowed Stability series

In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, behavioral scientist Jon Levy gives this quiet contributor a name: “glue player.” He describes them this way:

“They have unusually high emotional intelligence and know how to move the group forward. They anticipate needs, take actions no one asked them to and help teammates perform at their best, often without seeking recognition. They put the team above themselves and don’t fight for credit because their priority is progress, not attention.”

In the organizations I work with, I see a similar dynamic among leaders and key contributors. When faced with complexity, they appear unflappable. They seamlessly coordinate across teams and translate strategic intent into action. Their invisible work is human and relational, and it can explain why success happens even when systems are still evolving.

When organizations come to rely on glue players without acknowledging their contributions, they create a sense of borrowed stability. Strong results may continue, but they are not fully supported by systems designed to be sustainable. Hidden leadership labor fills the gaps between structure and outcomes, delivering excellence even when formal systems are incomplete.

Noticing and naming this human work is crucial. When we see it clearly, we can steward people and systems with responsibility and care.

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Context Session

If you’d like to explore patterns, constraints, or options in your leadership context, I offer a brief, no-charge Context Session. This conversation provides a structured way to gain perspective and guide your decision-making.

Next in the Borrowed Stability series

There’s an axiom made popular in the words of Maya Angelou, and you probably know it: “When you know better, you do better.” Those words seem easier to affirm in hindsight than to live out in the moment. Finding a way forward through complexity is uneven terrain.

As leaders, we can be grateful when a small insight leads to meaningful change. More often, leadership requires making sense of what’s happening on several levels at once: within our organizations, across the systems we navigate, and inside ourselves.

Holding all three together brings challenge and purpose to our work. It also raises questions about who we are beyond our roles, titles, and career paths — and about the inner voice that tells us what success should look like. Our work matters, yet it doesn’t define us. So, how do we lead well, stay human, and keep everything in perspective?

Many of the insights I share here come from working with dozens of organizations and hundreds of leaders — particularly in the nonprofit sector, but also in business. I don’t take for granted what those experiences have taught me. While mission pursuits and revenue models differ, the human and workplace dynamics are strikingly similar.

An Invitation to Thoughtful Leadership

What I’m offering through Leadership Field Notes is an invitation to learn from and with thoughtful leaders, myself included. Not because I have everything figured out, but because I’m committed to knowing better and doing better, especially as good judgment rarely comes with certainty.